An Early Plan for Open Source Peaceful Evolution

I’ve been thinking this through from fundamentals, and I think I have the beginnings of a detailed roadmap, at least for #2, but it ties in to most of them.

First, think of the axes on which growth depends, the elements of infrastructure. I’ve come up with: Communications, Transportation, Money, Land (Geography), Security, Reputation, and Dispute Resolution. These have to grow roughly in parallel, and one cannot get too far ahead of the others .

Second, think of the sphere of the Agora vs the sphere of the state. The agorasphere is effectively, for now at least, contained within the state’s sphere. There’s a border, or a frontier, at the edges of the agorasphere where it interfaces with the state sphere. Extend the above axes from the center of the spheres, and where they intersect that frontier is where all the action is.

Those nodes of intesection are where organizations and businesses can sit, one foot in each sphere, and act as intermediary. They take a lot of risk, but they also have the most potential for profit. Inside that frontier lie the fully agoric enterprises, buffered from the state sphere by the frontier enterprises. Less risk, and less profit.

As the frontier expands, it moves beyond the interfacing enterprises. They have a choice then. They can stay within the agorasphere and play it safe and steady, make money safely and slowly, but with the advantage of experience and reputation. Or they can follow the frontier outward.

The early work then is to identify where those nodes are, and communicate that to those ready to take advantage of the positions. This is just a start, I haven’t had time to flesh it all out. In particular is the network effects, as local agoraspheres grow large enough to start breaking clean through the interface and interact with each other.

I like how you’re thinking.
FSK had some useful, tho less theoretical, comments on this the other day.
I like your “The State is a Maginot Line” article as well:

It’s slowly starting to come together. I’m trying to drill down from principles and strategies to more and more concrete actions and tactics. FSK seems to be thinking along the same lines, though maybe less formally. Many of his ideas fit right on some of the nodes I was talking about, or where the nodes could be fairly quickly if this gets rolling a bit.

I was looking over some of the notes I’ve been writing, and another point jumps out as being important at this stage. The agorasphere starts out as completely isolated inside each of us. That ties into your “Step 0” (very apt labelling, by the way). It’s only after we’ve each planted and nurtured that seed, and pushed that sphere out a bit, that it is appropriate to try to connect it with others in any concrete way.

A concrete example of what I am talking about: on the axes of communication and transportation, the first place your agorasphere intersects the state sphere is mail and delivery services that come right to your house. The first step in pushing the frontier out along those axes is to set up a PMB, or mail drop. For money, it is your checking/savings account and your credit cards. Set things up so you pay cash for as many things as possible, don’t use credit or debit cards, and only keep enough money in the bank to pay bills that can’t be paid any other way. Use a web proxy for web browsing, and get used to encrypting emails as a matter of course.

Similar issues can be found along all of the axes, and in the spaces in between the axes.

Those are baby steps, (and none of them violate the law, btw). But it is important to lay the groundwork at each stage so that the next stage is resilient, scalable, and replicable. And so that the earlier stages remain self-sustaining and growing.

Free and Unashamed have an article “50 things you can do right now” that overlaps this idea a bit as well.

Concrete examples of early agorist businesses that can lie along the interface that tie into these baby steps for your customers: own a mail drop (like a UPS Store, but independent) and sell money orders. Run a web/mail proxy. Start a freight and snail-mail consolidation/forwarding service. It’s not as spectacular or dramatic as some of the other things proposed, but it is necessary infrastructure.

The problem with using E-Bay is that E-Bay is required to report all transactions to the State/IRS.

If I buy a gold coin from you on E-Bay, then the transaction is reported to the IRS and you owe capital gains taxes. That defeats the purpose of agorism.

I see what you’re doing now.

That doesn’t work for all goods and services. If you want to operate an unlicensed taxi service or an unlicensed medical care service, you can’t use E-Bay or other State venues.

Co-opting platforms and infrastructure is fine for those frontier business that have to interface between the two spheres. It’s really a given that they will. The goal there, the services these enterprises provide is to not only buffer the agorasphere’s interaction with the state sphere, but to move the activity of that enterprise to the agora side of the interface over time. To move it off the co-opted infrastructure into infrastructure it creates. That is how the frontier gets pushed outward. That’s the high risk/high reward function – high reward because it is so valuable to the agorasphere.

As to when you can read the detals…. Open Source, man! I’m trying to draw a map, for my own benefit and for others’, but a map is just a drawing of what the world looks like, with certain features selectively emphasized for clarity and cohesiveness. Everyone has to do their own trip planning. I can’t do that for them, that is what the free market and competition is for, to let the best practices emerge, and to adapt them to local conditions.

I’m working on the map, (slowly, I just finished an 11-hour workday), but it really is itself an open source project.

Even Konkin counts on violent self-defense to make his plan work. So let’s not tip-toe around the topic or, worse, pretend it won’t be necessary.

Not avoiding it at all, but as you said, it is not tactically wise at this point. As far as more generally, see “Maginot Line”. For mopping up, for clearing obstacles, for defense against immediate threats yes, but not as the main thrust. It can’t be a primary strategy, just a supporting tactic, and only when others are not sufficient. They most definitely will insufficient be at some point, and there needs to be preparation for that. But it is adjunct, initiated by them (or their threats), not something we incorporate into our broad strategy.

And you argued there that government assets are unowned and subject to homesteading. I’m not sure what the right answer is here. I find some validity to both the conclusions you’ve stated but they conflict – don’t you think?

Moral vs tactical. Yes, the are subject to homesteading. Tactically it is not always wise to actually do so until the proper time.

Define “innocent bystanders”. Are people who actively support the state in this category? Are people who passively support the state in this category? Who is *not* an innocent bystander?

For tactic’s sake, lets try to treat anyone not actively engaged in violence as innocent. If they starve because the state they are dependent on can no longer support them, tough shit for them. But we don’t need to be attacking them directly. Hearts and minds.

So are you saying that instead of homesteading a government datacenter we should convince taxpayers to stop paying for the datacenter?

That’s exactly it.

Wouldn’t righteous homesteading that leads to government increasing their demands on the taxpayers constitute a powerful argument for the taxpayers to stop paying?

Clearly, but how do they do that? Where do they go? Cutting off the supplies they depend on -removing them from the state sphere entirely, and placing them in the agorasphere – provides an equally compelling argument, but lays out a red carpet for acting on that argument. Tactically, we become their way out, instead of the ones backing them into a corner.

Is this sideways or are we just in opposition?

It’s sideways, I think, because we overlap on the insurgency part, its just a matter of which we see as primary. Where I think you see a choice of going directly at one or the other, I see going at both simultaneously, aiming at the point where the two intersect. Our means are economic, not strictly insurgent.

This kind of nice-sounding thought needs close attachment to rough reality in order for people to implement it. That’s what I am trying to do.

It’s what I am trying to do, too. But as I said, the way we slice the problem defines all subsequent thought. My concrete ideas depend on a specific way of slicing the problem. If we don’t agree there, all of my suggestions will look skewed to you, they’ll seem unimplementable, or counter to the model you have for how to proceed. We don’t have to agree rigidly, in entirety, but to share a general concept of how the problem is cut up.

“Co-Opt, Don’t Own, Basic Services”

OK, I see where you are going with that. It’s correct, but it is not static. The more basic the service, the later in the game it gets owned, the longer it remains merely co-opted. Think roads, power lines, internet. The more concrete and specific the service, the earlier it gets privatized. At first, nearly all services are co-opted. And it does not mean that the whole of some given service is either co-opted or owned. Like your eBay example, it is a hybrid of the two. As things progress pieces of these services become private, until the whole service is, or at least until the majority of our needs can be provided by the private part of them.

Remember, those other insurgencies have different goals. Their ultimate aim is to co-opt all services, and all power structures. Our ultimate goal is to decentralize and privatize all services, and eliminate the existing power structures entirely. We’re really trying to create a new world, a new civilization, even, not simply take over the old one.

Think of this frontier not as a static line, but as a moving front. It is not moving through concrete space, but through an abstract space defined by the lines of force (the axes I described earlier), power relationships, and networks. Ahead of the line are coopted services that are leveraged to pull the line forward. Behind it are privatized services, free markets, true wealth accumulation. This is the engine that is driving the line forward economically, and it is the safe haven we invite fellow victims of the state to join us in.

You might build A-Bay behind the line, host it in Panama or the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and put it on Tor, but the state can still take it out.

As long as there are living, breathing people operating in meatspace, the state can take them out.

Again, the agorasphere is not a physical space, it’s just a term for the sum total of agorist activities. They have to be decentralized, distributed, and numerous in order for the sphere as a whole to be resilient.

You’re a bit generous in the comparison, but it is not too far off. We don’t disagree so much on what to do, as in what to emphasize, what direction to move when. There’s a huge overlap in concretes. But more importantly, the model I’m looking at implies a certain ordering of things, certain arrangements of priorities. Not in a “to follow me you must do this” kind of way, but in a “do it this way and its much more likely to work” kind of way. Your model implies different arrangements.

Let me try one last analogy, just to describe our core difference. This is only about the model, but the model implies the concretes.

Draw a graph, with the Y (vertical) axis labeled, “The State”, and the X (horizontal) axis labeled “The Market”. The bottom of the Y axis is all-powerful state, the top is no state. The left of the X axis is no markets, the right is fully free markets. Draw a “freedom” arrow from the bottom left (all state, no markets) to the top right (no state, free markets). It’s a 45 degree angle upward, and that is the line we both want to follow. No disagreement there, I hope.

Now, draw a horizontal line near the bottom, above the X axis. That is your slicing of the problem. Your view is to move that line upward. As it does, the point on the freedom arrow that intersects your line moves up and to the right. Less state, freer markets. Great! that’s moving the right direction. Still no disagreement, I hope.

Now erase your line, and draw a vertical line, just to the right of the Y axis. That’s my slice of the problem. I want to push that line to the right, so that the point where the freedom arrow intersects it moves up to less state, more markets. I think we still agree that is a good result. It’s the same result.

In fact, both lines can coexist.

So the question is, which line do we push on? Look at the axes again. The one labeled “State” could also be labeled “Them”. The one labeled “Markets” could also be labeled “Us”.

Now, is it easier and more effective to push “Us”, or to push “Them”? Which is more likely to produce blowback – both from the state, and from those attached to or dependent on the state? Which is more positive, more oriented toward growth rather than destruction? Which axis do we control already?

You see, if you are pushing the horizontal line upward, and I say, for instance, “we need to invent a new internet protocol”. You’re going to think I am crazy. It doesn’t help you push that line upward. It doesn’t fit your model. It fits mine, and it is something friends and I at work have actually examined in some detail. When I say “leave the gold and silver banking for later”, you might think I’m being too timid, or not thinking big enough. I see it as something that comes at a definite point based on my model, a point I’ve already defined (loosely), and where it does not have to be forced, it will be demanded. Profit potential will be the signal that the demand is there, and that it is time.

It doesn’t mean we can’t work together, only that we aren’t on the same page. I’m just afraid that you, pushing the line upward, are going to find that the weight of the world rests on that line, but me, pushing the other line, will have the wind at my back. So to speak, anyway, neither is going to be that easy.

Mighty fine collection of thoughts here, George. And even though we might bicker with each other at times over details, miscommunications and misunderstandings, the comparatively few humans who are past your Step 0 ought to be well-equipped to gather together in those loose network for trade and action, just as you suggest. [sarcasm]Now we just need a central registry of all Open Source Peaceful Evolutionaries.[/sarcasm]

Kyle, I’ll bet a lot of people would find it interesting to contemplate the graph/model you’re describing here. @libertysnippet did a YouTube narration of a powerpoint presentation recently which might have something in it for you as a communications model, at least, though the content there isn’t want you’re on about: Morality vs. Legality: A Framework

Sounds good, George… ok, you give me your nym first…

When I get to thinking about these things, I stumble upon two immediate problems:

1: All of the relationships we’ve built up with and among our fellow Open Source Peaceful Evolutionaries (let’s call ’em “ospeys”, for short) can’t transfer into nymspace. If I contact George under his real identity via the anonymous anarcore using my “Oscar Wilde” nym and reveal Mike==Oscar to George, I and George are at some risk (eavesdropping, subsequent message capture, any of the three screwing up or selling out). Additionally, George can’t then go on and make introductions to other ospeys for Oscar, because Oscar basically has no network reputation, only George’s word. Getting to critical mass becomes a problem. Likewise, if Oscar contacts George’s “Trader Joe” nym, the two of them would be smart not to share real-world details. It would seem to me for this reason that the likely starting point is with people who have long been trading with each other under cypherpunk-type nyms already. Getting to anything like the critical mass that the division of labor in our present society seems to call for seems really hard (know any anarchist rice farmers?).

2: Trust is very poorly transitive. If A trusts B (A->B) and B trusts C (B->C), there’s effectively no reason why A->C or any other relation there to hold. Of course, I fall myself into a trap of “I trust X” being a yes/no proposition, when what we really operate off of day to day are trust continua (e.g.: I trust the guy at the convenience store to give me a pack of cigarettes when I hand him some banknotes, but I’m not necessarily going to accept his offer to house-sit for me while I’m away).

There are functioning for mitigating the problem in (2): pure authoritarian (you will trust Carlo because Don Cebolla trusts him, and I’ll break your legs if you disagree), quasi-authoritarian institutional (you will trust Nigel because Nigel is a Master Mason), peer-to-peer trendy (I ought to trust Kevin because I’m a punk and Kevin wears similar clothes), and so on. They all have their strengths and weaknesses (philosophical, structural and against external attack), but can provide some level of mitigation.

Lemme know if you come up with anything else, for sure! I have many times over the past few years found myself modeling some sort of trade/services directory for anti-statists to register themselves with an be able to make introductions to each other and others… and thus far have always come away thinking “risks too high, uptake too weak”. Only one thing’s for sure: we’re not the only ones devoting bits of brainpower to the problemopportunity.

There’s one way to make trust transitive. If you introduce X into the trust network, you’re taking partial responsibility for X if he later causes a problem. If you’re really sure that X is trustworthy, you can say “I take 100% responsibility for X.” If you’re partially sure, you can say “I take 5% responsibility for X.”

“I take 100% responsibility for X.” means “I take personal responsibility for losses if X causes a problem.” That’s a promise backed by my property and reputation.

If you know I’m a deadbeat, then why am I in your trust network? If you think I’m a deadbeat, then X can try to secure a trust backing from someone else, or post collateral.

I’ve become very good at identifying parasitic people. I don’t think an undercover Statist or deadbeat could fool me.

“Kyle, I’ll bet a lot of people would find it interesting to contemplate the graph/model you’re describing here. @libertysnippet did a YouTube narration”

I hope so. Not everybody naturally works from explicit models, but it works for me. Time management is killing me, living in mode zero is brutal,and working out of it just adds to the time pressure. I look at it as paying my dues for past indiscretions. I’ve got a milestone identified that will allow me to move to Wyoming (for the FSW), and hopefully to have more free time to work on small hobbies like rebuilding civilization from scratch in an environment hostile to the first one, let alone v2.0. I’m gaining on it rapidly.

I’ll get something on the Agorist Roadmap compiled ASAP, along with my “Agorist Manifesto in 95 Theses”, suitable for nailing to a door near you.

Libertysnippet is a very smart woman, worth checking in on regularly. I particularly liked this article that came in shortly after the one you mention:

http://libertysnippet.com/75/a-nation-of-laws/

Note how she implicitly drew on Robb’s “OODA Loop” idea, though she tells me she hadn’t known of it when she wrote this.

“we’ve built up a lot of reputation with our real names (presumably, hehe). So it would be a net loss to use a system where that becomes useless.”

It would be far from useless, it would be multiplied, leveraged.

Forgive me for butting in here, gentlemen, but you “might” be forgetting that there is no need (and no real possibility) of just ONE system or method to serve all.

I can see the potential for MANY different, and different size systems, networks and organizations. They may decide to associate, or not, for all kinds of reasons. Some will succeed and grow, some fail and fade – for all sorts of reasons. That’s the nature of the free market, of course.

Nobody is going to know the absolute “right” way to do this – possibly ever, but certainly not until a few have been done for a while and others learn from their mistakes. And here I’m talking especially about the encryption, trust rating thing of larger, more formal operations.

The FSW people in my area have a fairly good, informal and simple “agora” working now and we don’t bother with encryption – though many of us have that capability. We know each other personally, so don’t need codes or even much record keeping.

But it is still evolving, of course, and as more people become involved things may change. We shall see. :)

@MamaLiberty “Forgive me for butting in here, gentlemen, but you “might” be forgetting that there is no need (and no real possibility) of just ONE system or method to serve all.”

As far as I am concerned, you are always welcome to “butt in”. :-). (Not that anybody else isn’t) You’re right, centralizing to one system would be disastrous. I’m not on about the way *evrerybody* should do it, only the way *I* want to do it (and to convince George and others to help ;-) ) . I see the competition of methods as vital to the evolution of means toward the most effective and safest possible avenues, but even then, there will be multiple means, applied to multiple contexts and multiple goals. What we’re trying to do here is to flesh out as fully as possible one of those concrete ways. And I’m looking to see how we can spread the information, and later the concrete tools as widely as possible in keeping with the 11 points above.

The one area where George and I are butting heads on a “best” way is the co-option of infrastructure question, but we’ll almost certainly end up doing some measure of both, so it is not a serious conflict.

“The FSW people in my area have a fairly good, informal and simple “agora” ”

This is the huge advantage I see of Wyoming vs New Hampshire. New Hampshire has different advantages, and neither one is perfect by itself. I think they are very complimentary, bur I prefer the Wyoming approach. I’m very impressed with what’s been done there, and I wouldn’t want to change it. It’s already going in a direction that fits my vision of things, so there’s no reason to anyway – and you folks wouldn’t let me if I tried. I do want to get up there ASAP and start adding to it, though.

@George, I’m sorry if it comes off as lecturing. The last thing I want to do is have this turn confrontational or patronising. You’re comment “this isn’t a state-protected business”, I took as opposition to an emphasis on business methods, and maybe a belief that I am advocating using state-protected business methods as an avenue for this. I was arguing against both possibilities. I see where that comes off as lecturing if I misinterpreted your comment. What did you mean by it?

To learn more about FSW, take a look at our general website here: http://www.freestatewyoming.org/ for lots of information. To get to know us and our current activities, join us at our forum: http://www.fundamentalsoffreedom.com/fswforum/index.php

For the very best introduction to FSW life in Wyoming, and lots of face to face experience with the crazy cowboy folks, plan a visit and we’ll roll out the green carpet. (We’re partial to green here in the great American desert – and some of us don’t “do” red in anything but meat!) LOL

“Kyle, I was just suggesting that maybe the concept of core competency is not as relevant to agorism as you seem to want it to be?”

Well, we’ll have to put a big ol’ asterisk next to that idea to mark it as an area of deep disagreement. That way we can tiptoe around it as necessary, and maybe hash it out explicitly one day. So long as we don’t just pretend its not there and let it fester.

“Guys, what *is* going on in WY?”

I’m not in Wyoming, but I’m active in the discussion boards, and I’ve visited twice, but whatever I say doesn’t speak for anyone else there, just my own impressions. So….

“I hear lots about NH, but almost nothing about Wyoming. Are you guys keeping it quiet on purpose?”

Not so much on purpose as the fact that it is a much quieter approach. Less confrontational, less “in your face”. That’s in keeping with Wyoming’s culture. It’s a more reserved, more live and let live culture, and the tactics used in NH wouldn’t play as well there. I don’t mean just the FSWers, but the culture of the place as a whole.

In Wyoming, its more about fitting into the communities, getting to know people, and working with them. The natives are already hugely pro-liberty, and they don’t need to be pushed into anything. Moving there really means wanting to adopt that lifestyle, you can’t expect to move to a big city like Manchester and keep up the same lifestyle you came from. The population of the whole state is less than 5 times the population of Manchester, and less than the city-limits population of Tucson, AZ, where I currently live. The biggest population towns are Cheyenne and Casper, both at about 50K. The next biggest after that, I think, is Gillette at around 20K.

What’s going on there is people quietly adapting to living a pretty free life on the whole, and helping each other out, building relationships and informal trading networks. And doing things like OC in town as a means of outreach, going to city council and county board meetings, etc. It’s more oriented toward the long-run than the more immediate activism of NH.

The political strategy difference is that FSW aims at the county level, more than the state as a whole. The plan that has been loosely followed is to encourage moving to the smallest counties first, such as one of the counties I looked at moving to – Crook – that has 6000 people and one traffic light.

A lot of people confuse the goals and methods described in the book, “Molon Labe” (by our founder, Boston T. Party) and the actual day to day reality of the FSW here now. Many seekers are very unhappy that we are not busily carrying it out.

I don’t really know if Ken (Boston) originally envisioned the reality as conforming to the story, but it just isn’t happening and he’s made no pretense of insisting that it do so.

FSW has achieved a life of its own, that’s all. :)

“A lot of people confuse the goals and methods described in the book, “Molon Labe” (by our founder, Boston T. Party) and the actual day to day reality of the FSW here now. Many seekers are very unhappy that we are not busily carrying it out.”

When I said “loosely”, I meant it in the sense of “not really at all” :-)

On the other hand, there seem to be a disproportional number of FSWers in Crook and Weston, and I think that the book has had at least an inspirational effect on whatever individual strategies people choose. I seem to remember somebody on the board saying they started a campground, didn’t they?

But it is not anything close to “strategy” in the sense that the FSP was originally envisoned.

I saw a great quote on Facebook today that reminds me of how the FSW is going:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

[quote]
I just don’t see any activity. You might get even more persons of high moral character if you let those of us outside WY know of your accomplishments. It’s a sales thing.
[/quote]

Well, let me try it again. Kyle said it pretty well, but let me emphasize… The ONLY activity done “officially” as FSW is the annual camp out, and that is organized, put on and paid for by individuals in a completely voluntary and more or less random manner. It is chaos and unorganization to the max that somehow magically WORKS to produce exactly what everyone wants or can live with. It’s true anarchy in motion. :)

The campground and new shooting range are other examples, in a way. Both are the private property of an individual who has made these facilities available to FSW – and other folks as he wishes. It has been the pleasure of those involved to work with him and donate time/materials to help make them a reality. It isn’t an FSW “project – the owner and some of those participating just happen also to be FSW members.

And so it goes. I could tell you some of what the FSW individuals choose to do to improve their lives and community, but the fact that they are FSW members isn’t really central to it. They’d be the same good neighbors if FSW vanished tonight.

And, for us, that’s just exactly the way it should be. If “quality” people are not attracted by that, then I don’t know what to say.

Just thought of another example, for whatever it is worth. Some FSW members here have a “library” to gather and preserve as many good books as possible, especially freedom philosophy, freedom fiction and material involving survival and other skills that might be lost in a catastrophic breakdown of society.

Membership is open to anyone who wants to pay the small fee, but right now I think mostly FSW folks are members. The books are kept, many or a few, in the homes of the members and loaned by mail or as folks travel. The forum is a vast help in this, of course.

Many FSW members homeschool their children, and we’ve talked about doing some “apprenticeship” type things so young people can learn skills their parents can’t teach them.

But again, this is between individuals and is not any formal part of the FSW unorganization. [grin]

“Some FSW members here have a “library” to gather and preserve as many good books as possible, … and we’ve talked about doing some “apprenticeship” type things so young people can learn skills their parents can’t teach them.”

Cool. I wasn’t even aware of that. I’ve been saving books, too, for the same reason. When I move, the majority of the U-Haul will be books – I’m somewhere over 1000 right now (after donating ~200 to a local homeschoolers’ association). I figured when I got up there, I’d start a lending library. Nice to see something like that already going on.

One of the entrepreneurial ideas I’ve been kicking around is some kind of school, or just freelance teaching, aimed primarily at homeschoolers for supplemental education in history, science, math, computer science, etc. I’d never go for any kind of accreditation, and wouldn’t teach to any state curriculum, but I think it could be valuable to parents who want their kids to have an education and don’t care about the official piece of paper.

Which, I think, fits very nicely with agorism in general, and even the topic of this thread. It’s another one of those things that dilutes state power, builds resources – both for myself and the young ‘uns – helps create trust and trading networks, and is open source, resilient, replicable, etc.

@MamaLiberty: “With the folks so spread out, a central location wouldn’t help much and sending books by mail is expensive.”

There’s two ideas that popped into my head that fit the broader topic here, and also have beneficial secondary effects. First, a bookmobile. One weekend in Newcastle, next weekend in Lander, that kind of thing. Return what you borrow when the bookmobile comes around again. It could be done out of the back of a pickup truck at first, or from a cheap used box van. I’ve always wanted to buy one of those anyway.

The other comes from the idea that there seems to be a lot of travel around the state, FSWers visiting each other. This could be co-opted as an ad-hoc transportation network. Jones in Lander is going to ride his motorcycle into Casper this weekend, via Thermop. He puts the word out that he can carry some things people need transported – a small stack of books, some elk-jerky, or that gold ounce that Smith owes Johnson for services rendered. At some point, if people are willing to pay for this, someone could be a weekend courier, make a circuit of the state picking up and dropping things off.

The bookmobile could serve the same purpose secondary to its book lending, and in either case, a resource is created that helps make trading a little more efficient, and also helps make the entire community a little more socially cohesive.

That’s not to take away from the other ideas. I love the cafe idea and the branch library idea, and those have a lot of secondary benefits as well. They also would have add-on effects in combination with the above.

I loved that movie “The Postman”. I could see myself being that guy.

“The bottom line is that any and all of these things will take some individual with the vision, ability, capital and time to do it. Even if a group of individuals decide to take it on, someone has to take the point and make it happen.

Opportunities abound. When did you say you were going to get here? [laugh]”

Oh, yer killin’ me. I’d be doing it today if I was there. This is exactly the kind of thing I’d be working on, I got me a knack for logistics, and I’ve already got a good start on the books. I’ll be there as soon as I am free to go, gotta serve out my self-imposed sentence here first, so long as doing so remains within my power. That’s step zero.

No, George, I’ve been telling you that from the beginning. You just don’t listen. :(

Hate to resurrect a non-conversation here – but privacy does not need to be an issue for us. All the tools necessary for privacy in activism currently exist and can protect against all but the most vast and concentrated efforts effectively as long as you behave as if you’re always under surveillance. Some of them are less than perfect from a usability standpoint, which is something that will hopefully improve soon.